


Tu, In Mulieribus

by sage_theory (papersage)



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-30
Updated: 2010-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 20:12:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papersage/pseuds/sage_theory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taking place pre-series, Kaylee has to go on a job, and Inara teaches her how to do it, among other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tu, In Mulieribus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Insane-Duckfish](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Insane-Duckfish).



**I.**

  
"Well, we'll just find ourselves another gorram way of gettin' in!" Mal says, and slams his hand on the table. Jayne and Zoe don't jump, but Inara and Kaylee certainly do.

"I could go in, I suppose," Zoe replies, crossing her arms. "I could learn it easy enough to do for just a little while."

Jayne laughs until he realizes he's within arm's reach of Zoe and Zoe's gun. Not that her fist wouldn't be bad enough. Jayne's nose and jaw and balls can testify to that.

"While you're a very lovely woman, Zoe, and I'm sure many of my clients would be very eager to employ your services..." Inara begins to say.

"You sayin' I ain't the Companion type?" Zoe asks, leveling a look that makes Inara wither.

"Take it as a compliment," Mal says to Zoe.

Wash puts his hand over his wife's. "I would be too jealous to let any other man see you all dressed up anyway. I'd kill any man who even though of touching you."

With that, Zoe shrugs away her fierceness into a bored look, and only Zoe sees the little flicker of jealousy across Mal's face. She will follow Mal into battle, she will trust him, she will obey him - but he will never have the ability to calm her. It's not his fault. He, like her, is a soldier, a thief. Their scars can only reflect each other.

"Maybe we can hire someone else. Got be lotsa ex-Companions on Persephone what's lookin' for work. Or at least some jien huo willin' to pretend," Wash puts in.

"Yeah, 'cause splittin' the money seven ways instead-a six is really gonna put food on the table," Jayne says.

"Jayne's right," Kaylee says, aware that she sounds just the slightest bit whiny. "Come on, Captain. I can do it, just let me."

"No. Now I have put my foot down about this. We are not sendin' Kaylee in to pretend to be a Companion to this hwoon dahn. And that's just that. I'm willin' to hear any other plans, but that's a horse ain't none of us riding."

"I vote we send Kaylee in," Jayne replies, giving Mal a defiant glare which makes Zoe laugh.

"So do I," Zoe says. "Sorry, captain, but it's the best plan we've got."

"With a few lessons Kaylee really could be quite convincing," says Inara.

"And we ain't gotta split the money with anyone else. Six ways goes a lot farther than seven," Jayne reminds him.

"Now I've said that -"

"Five votes against one," Zoe replies, smirking when she looks sidelong at Kaylee, who is blushing so intensely that her chest has turned a shade of pink only a shade paler than sunrise on Persephone.

  
**II.**

  
Kaylee gives herself credit. She lasted a whole twenty minutes before failing completely. Still, this is just Inara giving her a crash course, and the whole job depends on Kaylee convincing this guy that she's a companion.

"I don't know if I look right in this dress. And it itches," Kaylee says, pulling up the top of the bustier up, because she's not sure that she's entirely comfortable with how high her breasts have been shelved, or how much of them are showing. A few inches downward, and everyone will be able to see her business. "It's gonna fall. Don't you have something else? Something that's more...like me. I like pink. Pink is good."

"Pink is for little girls and the tong xing boys," Inara tells her. "Tonight you are a Companion, a woman, so you wear red and black."

"But, I just don't think..." Kaylee looks at herself in Inara's mirror and her shoulders slump, her eyes turn away from the image before her. "This dress is so...*piao liang* and I'm...not."

Inara's sigh is barely audible, and does not show on her face hardly at all, except for the way her eyes change. Kaylee never realized just how subtle Inara could be, until that moment. Until she realized that everything Inara does must be so very, very calculated.

"Yes, you are Kaylee," Inara replies, mouth in a very delicate frown. She comes to stand beside Kaylee, and in her strappy, high soled shoes, she is inches taller. "A Companion is not her dress, nor even her looks. A Companion is her mind."

Suddenly, Inara's hands squeeze and push up around Kaylee's waist, forcing her to gasp. She sees herself in the mirror, her breasts rising high as her chest expands, her head tipping back a little.

Then Inara pulls the back of the dress up and her fingernails gently slide over Kaylee's bare buttocks. Goosebumps rise up and Kaylee has to brace on the sides of the mirror.

"Inara," she says, but that is all she says, because she does not truly want Inara to stop.

"You know, there are legends of a Companion named Zi Qian who could wear nothing but rags, and have men begging at her feet for a moment of her time," Inara whispers, breath warm on Kaylee's neck, her ear as that careful, cool hand snakes down, between her thighs. "Some say that she had special powers, some say she carried around special incense and perfumes that made men too intoxicated to notice her appearance."

Stuttering, Kaylee blinks hard, "W-w-what - oh, zao wu zhu - oh!"

The bite that Inara gives her only takes away from her remaining clarity, "What's the truth, you mean? Is that what you wanted to ask?"

Kaylee shakes her head eagerly, swallowing and the careful fingers, rubbed in perfume, part the lips of her cunt. "Yes."

Oh, mother of all *gods*, her breasts are straining against this dress and her nipples react to each little motion, the feel of the silk moving against them and the mirror is the only thing holding her upright.

"I believe that Zi Qian was simply wise. That she knew the truth of a Companion," Inara replies and runs her finger along the slick, warm folds. Kaylee wonders through the fog of shock and pleasure if Inara knew she was wet, if Inara has known all along what Kaylee felt for her, for this, and how Kaylee has longed her whole life not just to be cute or be pretty, not just to be the mei-mei or the friend or the perky mechanic - but just once she wants to be the nu shen, the one that men cross smoky bars for and write songs about.

Just once she has wanted to touch that sort of beauty, just once. She knows that if she could just *be* Inara for a second in time, then she could be satisfied, and it would be all right to spend the rest of her life with dirtied hands and a face smudged with grease and oil. Because at least then, while she lies on her back, listening to Serenity hum above her, she will know that just once, she was not just some simple bit of rock that orbited bright, bright suns - but that once, she herself was a thing radiant enough to push back the black itself.

Kaylee throws her head back so far she leans against Inara's shoulder and her breasts have come free of the dress finally, and the cold air of Inara's shuttle doesn't help them any.

"Inara, please," Kaylee begs, when finally Inara's fingertips have deigned to tease her clit.

"The truth of a Companion is simple, because it is the truth of women. You are the way to heaven, the one who has beauty and pleasure and grace and the ending of pain in her keeping. You are life when they are death, you are the stars when they are the black. Men need this, they search for it all their lives, and in you, they may touch it," Inara tells her, in whispers that have the weight of screams, of prophecy, of truth as real as all the worlds in the 'verse and the stars and the black itself. "But only if you consent. Only if you let them. Sex may be taken by force, but heaven is always willing. Look at yourself, Kaylee."

Kaylee opens her eyes on command and sees herself, lips in an 'oh' of pleasure, breasts thrust out and pale white throat exposed. She keeps her chin high, as if it will help her to breathe again, but it doesn't. She can't, because Inara has given up teasing and begun to rub her clit in earnest, with pressure and speed that Kaylee would ask for more of, if she could, but for the moment she is not entirely in her body.

Outside of herself, she sees a scene like a savage, breathtaking windstorm. She is the tree, and Inara the wind that batters and ravages and bends the tree into the shapes it could not assume all by itself. Inara is snow and ice and storms and Kaylee is blessed to stretch out her arms, to reach behind herself and take hold of Inara's arm, to give a low croaking moan, like the straining of fragile old branches.

If all that Inara has said is true - how can it not be? - if Kaylee is this gatekeeper, this path to heaven, then Inara is the destination. Inara is dark eyed grace itself. If Kaylee is just this once to be a star, then Inara is the black that surrounds her, holds her, envelopes her and makes her bright by contrast.

  
**III.**

  
Jayne whistles appreciatively, and Mal can hardly stand to look. Wash turns red as ripe strawberries and suddenly insists that there's a very important emergency in the cockpit, one that requires that he stay in there and Kaylee stay out.

Zoe laughs at her husband's fumbling, because she knows that some part of it's for Kaylee's benefit, not his own, to make her feel more confident. Though, she must admit that the blush was rather genuine, which speaks to how little the gesture was needed after all.

Not that Zoe could blame him. The Kaylee that emerges from Inara's shuttle is not the same old Kaylee they're used to, the one who wears emotions on her sleeve so clear that you could peg them from fifty yards. This is not the girly grease monkey they've become accustomed to.

This creature, that walks in slow steps alongside Inara is one of great dignity and grace, of measured, errorless movements.

"So what do you think, will she pass?" Inara asks, and without being told to, Kaylee gives a slow twirl, to let them see all angles.

"Good gorram, woman. Did you have to make her looks so..." Mal starts to say, and scrubs the back of his head with his hand, a sign of his obvious discomfort. His is no act, though. Zoe knows

"So what?" Kaylee asks, picking up an eyebrow and staring down the captain in a way she never would have before. Her voice is as gentle spring breeze, but the effect is harsh and has the captain stumbling over his words.

"Well, if he won't pay for you, I sure as hell will." Jayne's dirty grunt of a laugh if is met with Kaylee giving him nothing more than a look that stops his laughter dead.

"We gonna gawk or we gonna go steal somethin'?" Zoe asks, more to give Mal a break than anything.

Mal says yes, but leave mumbling a string of curses that starts with comparing the entire job to a pot of panda piss and proceeding on from there. Zoe smirks and says to Kaylee, "This way, ma'am."

Kaylee and Inara trade kisses and wishes for good luck as Kaylee turns away and follows Zoe out to the shuttle that will take her down to the world. As they ride, Kaylee sitting in the front seat, staring out across the distance they travel, Zoe comments, looking sidelong, "You look pretty gorram convincing in that get up. Who knew you had it in you? Maybe you oughta think of taking up another trade. A lot more money in Companioning than this."

The person who replies is not a Companion, but Kaylee herself, with a graceless and obvious sadness in her eyes, "Oh, no. It's just for tonight. Just this once, that's all."

Zoe suspects that there is something more than pretty dresses and playing Companion to Kaylee's long face, but they're in the middle of a job, and Kaylee's already proven that she's a grown woman. If she can put on the mantle of Companion, even for just a few hours, she can deal with her business.

Still, it's *Kaylee*. "Well, good. Don't know who we'd get to fix up this go se ship otherwise."

"No, Serenity's not go se at all. She's beautiful. You just gotta look at her right," Kaylee insists, and the sorrow evaporates into pride, into a woman that squares her shoulders, sits up straight, and raises her chin to the world.

  
**IV.**

  
Knowing they have to sell the dress back when they return to Persephone, Kaylee waits until all the others are asleep as they drift on a pre set course for Whitefall, through relatively safe space.

On bare feet, she sneaks into the engine room with her dress held up so that it does not rustle as she passes down the hall. The grating hurts her feet, but if she steps just-so, the way that Inara taught her to walk in those gorram high heels, then it's bearable.

Kaylee only turns on one light, because she can navigate the engine room well enough so long as she can see. Though she's not sure if she could do it in pitch black darkness yet.

She makes her way to the bulk of the motivator and actuator, and gently lowers herself to the ground and slides beneath them. Her hands touch the warm metal of their casing, and her sparkling black dress is spread around her, slightly hitched up, like a blanket of space itself.

Serenity hums lows, a night song of going on half-power, of staying low, of a long drift. Kaylee slides her hands along the metal, not caring if they get blackened by grease. Serenity is beautiful, she is beautiful, everything is beautiful.


End file.
